Tim was left confused by this: unsure why they took his photo, wondering if it was simply a scare tactic. On his return, the policeman, says Tim, “told us they were going to let us off with a warning and they would take a photograph of us so that there’s a record in case we ever did it again.” One of the policemen took their names and addresses and asked about previous convictions before leaving them with another officer to check their details. It all became about kids: ‘What if a kid had walked in? Are you aware you could go on the sex offenders list for doing what you’ve done?’ He was trying to scare us.” The officers sat Tim and the other man down near the station’s taxi rank. “He whispered in his ear and I remember the guy saying, ‘Oh, well done.’” While doing this, says Tim, one of the policemen stopped to speak to a fourth officer. “They said, ‘Can you follow me?’ They took us upstairs and said, ‘Do you know that what you were doing is illegal? They then walked us through the station.” Tim is muscular and tattooed, with deep laughter lines and an unusually expressive way of speaking, as if trying to conjure the feeling of each word with his tone. “Just as I was coming the cops appeared,” he says. And they did not see the police entering. Only he and one other turned to face each other. Tim had walked down the steps to the toilet at the Liverpool Street station when, he says, he saw about eight men standing at the urinal masturbating, looking straight ahead at the wall.
It’s dirty.Īs each man’s story begins to unfold, the responses to these jabs swirl together, sometimes echoing each other, often in the most surprising and devastating ways imaginable. Why, it is asked, do they have to do that? It’s disgusting. Judgment and shame, meanwhile, encircle the practice, and from parts of all communities. What began, then, as an investigation into the confines of sex in public toilets, came to expose wide and unexpected areas: how little the inner lives of many gay and bisexual men have changed, how a homophobic culture fuels child sexual abuse, and how much the response to cottaging affects everyone. And for the rest, a joyous, even defiant paroxysm of lust, unencumbered by the prim restraints of heterosexual life.
For others, a burst of oxygen in otherwise airless lives. Some started going to toilets for sex when they were still children.Īs such, the picture formed by the cottagers has several faces: For some, it is a shadow of what lies outside. What emerged was a parallel world much deeper, more secretive and more complex than first appears – one of both the liberated and the closeted of politicians and celebrities mixing with the most private of people where self-discovery and escapism intermingle with addiction, abuse, and sexual violence. (In the USA, toilets where men meet for sex are sometimes called “tearooms” rather than cottages – and in Australia, they are called “beats”.) Over the next few weeks, BuzzFeed News began interviewing individuals who go cottaging, including one public figure. And whether police can observe members of the public going to the toilet without invading the privacy of the innocent. The questions also expose the difficulties of allocating police resources (in the case of Liverpool Street, those of the British Transport police) when the 21st-century horrors of terrorism demand so much. Why, in an age of Grindr and internet dating and supposed liberation, are men still meeting for sex in toilets? How can this be policed without damaging the relationship with the LGBT community? Are the laws in this area still fit for purpose – and how can they be applied to serve the public as a whole? What the phone call led to was unexpected: the uncovering of multiple issues that in 2017 many presume are no longer relevant – let alone unresolved – and multiple questions that have never been answered. But Tim is far from alone and, it transpires, his experiences with the police are far from uncommon. We will call him Tim.Ĭlandestine sexual encounters between men in public conveniences sound like a black-and-white scene from the 1950s, not a practice still prevalent 50 years after decriminalisation. Speaking quickly, he said they had stopped him in London’s Liverpool Street station toilets, paraded him through the station, taken his name and address, questioned him, and warned him that if he was found there again he would be arrested and could have to sign the sex offender register. A distressed man in his mid-forties, his voice tight with anxiety, telephoned BuzzFeed News to say the police had just apprehended him for cottaging. It started with a phone call in early July.